THE ISLAND; Finding Refuge in the Family Fireworks

By Robin Finn

Published: July 2, 2006

GROWING up Grucci has its perks and perils, even after the Grucci in question is all grown up. Take 56-year-old Felix J. Grucci Jr., the involuntarily retired Republican politician who served one term in Congress before being ousted in 2002 by Timothy H. Bishop, a neophyte Democrat from the Hamptons, in a vicious campaign characterized by mutual smear-slinging. Is Mr. Grucci nostalgic for Congress, or for the six rollicking years he spent as supervisor of the Town of Brookhaven? Not exactly.

''Getting yourself elected to public office has gotten to be a blood sport,'' he says. ''It's not enough to win. Today the opponent is out to destroy you, and destroy your family name, and I don't want to say it's like what the Mafia does to its enemies, but at the end of the day, it's not exactly not like what the Mafia does.''

Nostalgic about the family business? Absolutely. Mr. Grucci, whose Great-Uncle Tony renounced a ho-hum career as a greengrocer for a more swashbuckling gig peddling fireworks, has made a smooth return to pyromania from politics. It's as if he never left, especially at this time of year.

''The Fourth of July is Christmas for the fireworks industry,'' Mr. Grucci says in his baronial office at frenzied Fireworks by Grucci, booked solid with 150 Independence Day displays nationwide. As for local competitors like Bay Fireworks, which put a dent in Grucci's municipal portfolio, Mr. Grucci waxes cavalier: ''Saying Grucci has competition from them is like saying I am a competitor of Frank Sinatra because we both sing.'' We get the tune.

What does scare him is Mother Nature. God forbid, he says, that it rains on, yes, Umbrella Beach in Montauk. Or on Eisenhower Park, where there's to be a $100,000 Grucci display choreographed to music. Or that infant piping plovers, the endangered birds that are the nemeses of East Coast fireworks, aren't flight-ready to exit the Island's beaches before the weekend festivities. (The West Coast culprit is an endangered turtle.) Mr. Grucci, who has a tattoo of a panther on his right bicep and of Jesus on his left, is not sold on the plovers' sacrosanct status. ''The environmentalists say they're endangered, but we run into them everywhere,'' he said. ''Go figure.''

Oops. Don't mention environmentalists. Mr. Grucci has had his share of headaches relating to them. While he was Brookhaven's supervisor, a plover sighting threatened to close the beach at Davis Park, on Fire Island. Mr. Grucci asked the United States Fish and Wildlife Service what would happen if he didn't comply. ''I was told I could be arrested and the town fined $10,000 a day,'' he said. Happily, the plovers nested elsewhere.

More serious were allegations, in a campaign advertisement for Mr. Bishop, that Fireworks by Grucci polluted the groundwater here with perchlorate, a byproduct of fireworks manufacturing. It was inadvertent, confined to a small area and cleaned up, Mr. Grucci says, but the damage was done.

''If you are perceived as being anti-environment, you don't hold office very long out here,'' he says. Life is simpler, he adds, now that he is out of politics.

Though the company's manufacturing plant is in Virginia, its products are tested and tweaked right here on 90 forlorn acres of sand and scrub pines reached by a winding road to nowhere. The sense of desolation is by design.

Twice in the past, Grucci plants have blown up: the first in Elmont in 1929, a blast that killed two relatives; the next in Bellport in 1983, the year Grucci established itself as a fireworks world-beater with its Brooklyn Bridge centennial. That was in May. On a Saturday in November, the Bellport plant exploded, killing Mr. Grucci's brother, James, and a cousin. Had Mr. Grucci not been running late, he might have perished, too.

''It destroyed the family morale,'' he says of the accident. ''But my sister and I decided we couldn't leave the fireworks business and let that be the final chapter.''

They rebuilt, but not in Bellport. There is a bit of a not-in-my-backyard attitude toward the Grucci operation on Long Island. Here in Brookhaven, there are no neighbors -- perfect for testing explosives! Of all sorts. In the 1940's, Mr. Grucci's father, Felix Sr., began supplying the military with training explosives; in 1994, Grucci received a $1.3 million contract to make simulated missiles for the Army, and the relationship has continued. For training troops in Iraq, the company simulates trip mines and grenades. For pleasing civilians on Independence Day, it serves up a different product.

''I often say we're the jackass of many trades and the master of none,'' Mr. Grucci says. Just kidding. His sister, Donna, chimes in with a clarification: Grucci has the same philosophy, she says, as one of its high-profile customers, Donald J. Trump. ''There is no room for flaws in his world. Ours either.''

As you leave Grucci Lane, the last signpost reads, ''Have a Safe Show.'' Consider it a family reminder.